Tensions Between Felski, de Certeau, and Lefebvre on the "Everyday"

Introduction

The concept of the "everyday" has been a fertile ground for theoretical inquiry across multiple disciplines, and the works of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Rita Felski represent three distinct yet interlocking approaches to this terrain. While de Certeau explicitly acknowledged Lefebvre's works as "a fundamental source" for his own thinking ¹, and Felski engages extensively with both predecessors, significant tensions emerge between their respective frameworks. These tensions revolve around several key axes: the relationship between the everyday and modernity, the gendering of everyday temporality, the spatialisation of power and resistance, and the valuation of repetition and habit.

Lefebvre and de Certeau: Convergence and Divergence

Points of Agreement

Lefebvre and de Certeau share important common ground, particularly in their rejection of a purely pessimistic, Marcusean reading of consumer society. Both theorists read consumption "not as sheer passivity within mechanisms of domination, but as a form of production, production of a different kind" ¹. This shared orientation means that for both thinkers, the everyday is not simply a site of oppression but also a locus of creative potential.

Furthermore, there is a direct genealogical link between Lefebvre's conceptual apparatus and de Certeau's most famous theoretical innovation. Lefebvre precisely defined the critique of everyday life as a "theory of tactics and strategies," with tactics referring to the everyday, to stagnant and trivial reality, and strategy to the domain of action and decision-making ². De Certeau's celebrated distinction between "tactics" and "strategies" in The Practice of Everyday Life thus represents a development of the Marxist concept of praxis found in Lefebvre's Volume II of Critique of Everyday Life, which de Certeau "read very closely" ².

Fundamental Disagreements

Despite this intellectual debt, the two theorists "part company on numerous points" ¹. The most significant divergence concerns the historical apprehension of daily life. Lefebvre situates the everyday within a specific history of modernity, understanding it as a phenomenon that emerges under particular conditions of capitalist development. De Certeau, by contrast, "confines himself to a 'phenomenology of social micro-behaviour pitched at the level of the longue durée'" ¹. This means that Lefebvre's everyday is historically contingent and potentially transformable through historical change, whereas de Certeau's everyday operates at a more transhistorical, anthropological level.

A second critical tension concerns the spatialisation of power and the everyday. Lefebvre saw everyday life as "a colonized space" — a territory occupied and administered by the forces of capital, the state, and bureaucratic rationality ². For Lefebvre, the everyday is a "lower sphere of meaning" that requires elevation above the ordinary to achieve its potential, yet it is simultaneously a place where "creative energy is stored in readiness for new creations" ². De Certeau, however, imagined the everyday quite differently: as "spaceless and formless practices without an organizing discourse" ². In de Certeau's framework, power operates through spatialised "strategies" that claim a "proper" (propre) domain, while everyday practices work "in time not space, employing tactics — short-term raids on power as opposed to strategic assaults from long-established positions" ². Where Lefebvre's everyday is a territory to be reclaimed, de Certeau's everyday is a guerrilla operation conducted from no fixed position.

Felski's Feminist Intervention

Rita Felski's contribution introduces a third, distinctly feminist perspective that generates tensions with both Lefebvre and, implicitly, de Certeau. Her critique operates on several levels.

The Problem of Gendered Dualisms

Felski's most pointed critique targets Lefebvre's "persistent opposition of cyclical and linear time, the everyday and the modern, the feminine and the masculine" ³. She argues that this rigid dualism is not merely analytically inadequate but carries problematic gender implications. In Lefebvre's schema, women are associated with cyclical, repetitive time — connected to nature, emotion, and sensuality, with a "lesser degree of estrangement from biological and cosmic rhythms" ¹. While Felski acknowledges that Lefebvre's perspective is "less censorious" than, say, Simone de Beauvoir's (for whom repetition signalled woman's "enslavement in the ordinary"), she nevertheless finds the underlying binary logic untenable ¹.

Felski's counter-argument is that "the temporality of everyday life is internally complex; it combines repetition and linearity" ³. Acts of innovation and creativity are "not opposed to, but rather made possible by, the mundane cycles of the quotidian," and conversely, "even the most repetitive of lives bears witness to the irreversible direction of time: the experience of aging, the regret of past actions or inactions, the premonition of death" ³. This represents a fundamental challenge to Lefebvre's entire temporal architecture of the everyday.

The Question of Home and Modernity

A second major tension concerns the relationship between the everyday, the home, and modernity. Felski directly challenges Lefebvre's view "that the habitual, home-centered aspects of daily life are outside, and in some sense antithetical to, the experience of an authentic modernity" ². She notes Lefebvre's palpable discomfort with suburban domesticity — his description of suburban houses where "the owners' superficiality oozes forth in an abundance of ridiculous details, china animals on the roofs, glass globes and well-pruned shrubs" ³. While Lefebvre is self-aware enough to be "critical of his own reaction," his framework ultimately positions the domestic sphere as a site of complacency and inauthenticity.

Felski, drawing on feminist scholarship, insists on a more nuanced reading. Home is not simply a refuge from modernity but is shaped by "broader social currents, attitudes, and desires" ². It can be a site of "female subordination" and intergenerational conflict, but also of creativity, identity formation, and even resistance ². This complicates both Lefebvre's Marxist disdain for domesticity and, by extension, de Certeau's tendency to locate authentic everyday practice in the public, urban realm of streets and city spaces.

The Feminist Double Vision

Felski articulates what might be called a feminist double vision of the everyday. On one hand, "the feminist gaze reveals the everyday world as problematic… it is here, above all, that gender hierarchy is reproduced, invisibly, pervasively, and over time" ⁴. On the other hand, "everyday life has also been hailed as a distinctively female sphere and hence a source of value" ⁴. This ambivalence — seeing the everyday as both the primary site of women's oppression and a domain of distinctive feminine knowledge and practice — distinguishes Felski's position from both Lefebvre's dialectical but ultimately masculinist framework and de Certeau's more universalising approach.

Implicit Tensions with de Certeau

While Felski's explicit critique is directed primarily at Lefebvre, her feminist framework also generates implicit tensions with de Certeau. De Certeau's "marginal human" of everyday practice, agency, and resistance is presented as "a more universal (though far from singular) figure" ⁴. Yet, as Nancy Ries notes, it is "the (Euro-American) city-strolling/riding/reading/storytelling/television-watching bricoleur of The Practice of Everyday Life that is most often invoked when Certeau's everyday is discussed" ⁴. This figure — implicitly male, mobile, and operating in public urban space — stands in tension with Felski's insistence on taking seriously the domestic, the habitual, and the home-centred dimensions of everyday life that have historically been coded as feminine.

Moreover, Felski's critique of the denigration of repetition has implications for de Certeau's framework. De Certeau's valorisation of the "tactic" — the clever trick, the subversive reuse, the "victory of the 'weak' over the 'strong'" ² — tends to privilege the disruptive, the inventive, and the momentarily transgressive over the sustained, the habitual, and the reproductive. Felski's insistence that repetition and innovation are not opposed but mutually constitutive challenges this implicit hierarchy.

Conclusion

The tensions between these three theorists of the everyday can be understood as a productive, evolving dialogue. Lefebvre establishes the everyday as a critical category, poised between colonisation and liberation, modernity and the quotidian. De Certeau refines this framework by shifting attention from spatialised domination to temporalised tactics, from the colonised territory to the guerrilla incursion. Felski, in turn, exposes the gendered assumptions underlying both predecessors' frameworks, challenging their dualisms, their suspicion of the domestic, and their implicit devaluation of repetition. Her feminist intervention does not simply reject Lefebvre and de Certeau but reworks their insights into a more complex, ambivalent, and ultimately more capacious understanding of what it means to live "day after day."

References

Felski, R. (2000) Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York: NYU Press, pp. 77–98. [Available in knowledge base as: Felski,R.(2000)_THE_INVENTION_OF_EVERYDAY_LIFE._NYU_Press,1_Doing_Time-_Feminist_Theory_and_Post.pdf]
Lefebvre, H. (1991) Critique of Everyday Life, tr. John Moore. London: Verso. [Available in knowledge base as: Lefevbre,H.(1991)_Critique_of_Everyday_Life._Verso,_UK.pdf]
Upton, D. (2002) "Architecture in Everyday Life," New Literary History, 33, pp. 707–723. [Available in knowledge base]
Ries, N. (2002) "Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror," New Literary History, 33, pp. 725–742. [Available in knowledge base]
Poster, M. (2002) "Everyday (Virtual) Life," New Literary History, 33(4), pp. 743–760. [Available in knowledge base as: Poster 2002.pdf]
Lefebvre, H. (1987) "The Everyday and Everydayness," Yale French Studies, 73, pp. 7–11.
de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gardiner, M. E. (2000) Critiques of Everyday Life. London: Routledge.
Smith, D. E. (1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

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